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Publications

2024

Contributions of Municipal Initiatives to Digital Health Equity

Authors
Almeida, F;

Publication
WORLD

Abstract
Sustainable initiatives play a crucial role in promoting digital health equity by addressing barriers to access and ensuring equitable use of digital health technologies and services. These initiatives may arise in various contexts, including local collaborative networks that emerge in the municipal context. This study aims to identify and characterize the municipal initiatives that have been developed in Portugal to promote digital health equity. It adopts a mixed methods approach to initially quantify the distribution of these projects in the Portuguese territory and, at a later stage, to understand the level of influence of these projects, considering their impact on individual, interpersonal, community, and societal levels. The findings identified 22 municipal sustainable initiatives and concluded that there is a strong relationship between the areas of community and individual influence. The results of this study are relevant to deepening the knowledge of bottom-up innovation in the digital health field and establishing public policies to increase the impact of these projects at the territorial level, the communities involved, and the social objectives addressed, contributing to greater social cohesion.

2024

Deep Learning and Machine Learning for Automatic Grapevine Varieties Identification: A Brief Review

Authors
Carneiro, GA; Cunha, A; Sousa, J;

Publication

Abstract
The Eurasian grapevine (Vitis vinifera L.) is the most widely grown horticultural crop in the world and is important for the economy of many countries. In the wine production chain, grape varieties play an important role as they directly influence the authenticity and classification of the product. Identifying the different grape varieties is therefore fundamental for quality control and inspection activities, as well as for regulating production. Currently, ampelography and molecular analysis are the main approaches to identifying grape varieties. However, both methods have limitations. Ampelography is subjective and prone to errors and is experiencing enormous difficulties as ampelographers are increasingly scarce. On the other hand, molecular analyses are very demanding in terms of cost and time. In this scenario, Deep Learning (DL) and Machine Learning (ML) methods have emerged as a classification alternative to deal with the scarcity of ampelographs and avoid molecular analyses. In this study, the most recent and current methods for identifying grapevine varieties using DL classification-based approaches are presented through a systematic literature review. The classification pipeline of the 31 studies found in the literature was described, highlighting its pros and cons. Most of the studies used DL-based models trained with leaf images acquired in a controlled environment at a maximum distance of 1.2 metres to classify grape varieties. In addition, there is a large gap between practical applications and the datasets used: a great lack of varieties, limited data acquired in the field and a lack of tests on plants under adverse conditions. Potential directions for improving this area of research were also presented.

2024

An Efficient Edge Computing-Enabled Network for Used Cooking Oil Collection

Authors
Gomes, B; Soares, C; Torres, JM; Karmali, K; Karmali, S; Moreira, RS; Sobral, P;

Publication
SENSORS

Abstract
In Portugal, more than 98% of domestic cooking oil is disposed of improperly every day. This avoids recycling/reconverting into another energy. Is also may become a potential harmful contaminant of soil and water. Driven by the utility of recycled cooking oil, and leveraging the exponential growth of ubiquitous computing approaches, we propose an IoT smart solution for domestic used cooking oil (UCO) collection bins. We call this approach SWAN, which stands for Smart Waste Accumulation Network. It is deployed and evaluated in Portugal. It consists of a countrywide network of collection bin units, available in public areas. Two metrics are considered to evaluate the system's success: (i) user engagement, and (ii) used cooking oil collection efficiency. The presented system should (i) perform under scenarios of temporary communication network failures, and (ii) be scalable to accommodate an ever-growing number of installed collection units. Thus, we choose a disruptive approach from the traditional cloud computing paradigm. It relies on edge node infrastructure to process, store, and act upon the locally collected data. The communication appears as a delay-tolerant task, i.e., an edge computing solution. We conduct a comparative analysis revealing the benefits of the edge computing enabled collection bin vs. a cloud computing solution. The studied period considers four years of collected data. An exponential increase in the amount of used cooking oil collected is identified, with the developed solution being responsible for surpassing the national collection totals of previous years. During the same period, we also improved the collection process as we were able to more accurately estimate the optimal collection and system's maintenance intervals.

2024

Branching pomsets: Design, expressiveness and applications to choreographies

Authors
Edixhoven, L; Jongmans, SS; Proença, J; Castellani, I;

Publication
JOURNAL OF LOGICAL AND ALGEBRAIC METHODS IN PROGRAMMING

Abstract
Choreographic languages describe possible sequences of interactions among a set of agents. Typical models are based on languages or automata over sending and receiving actions. Pomsets provide a more compact alternative by using a partial order to explicitly represent causality and concurrency between these actions. However, pomsets offer no representation of choices, thus a set of pomsets is required to represent branching behaviour. For example, if an agent Alice can send one of two possible messages to Bob three times, one would need a set of 2 x 2 x 2 distinct pomsets to represent all possible branches of Alice's behaviour. This paper proposes an extension of pomsets, named branching pomsets, with a branching structure that can represent Alice's behaviour using 2 + 2 + 2 ordered actions. We compare the expressiveness of branching pomsets with that of several forms of event structures from the literature. We encode choreographies as branching pomsets and show that the pomset semantics of the encoded choreographies are bisimilar to their operational semantics. Furthermore, we define well-formedness conditions on branching pomsets, inspired by multiparty session types, and we prove that the well-formedness of a branching pomset is a sufficient condition for the realisability of the represented com-munication protocol. Finally, we present a prototype tool that implements our theory of branching pomsets, focusing on its applications to choreographies. (c) 2023 The Author(s). Published by Elsevier Inc. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons .org /licenses /by /4 .0/).

2024

CINDERELLA Clinical trial (NCT05196269): using artificial intelligence-driven healthcare to enhance breast cancer locoregional treatment decisions

Authors
Bonel, EA; Kaidar-Person, O; Antunes, M; Ciani, O; Cruz, H; Di Micco, R; Gentilini, O; Heil, J; Kabata, P; Romariz, M; Gonçalves, T; Martins, H; Borsoi, L; Mika, M; Pfob, A; Romem, N; Schinköthe, T; Silva, G; Senkus, E; Cardoso, MJ;

Publication
ANNALS OF SURGICAL ONCOLOGY

Abstract

2024

Specialized tabu search algorithm applied to the reconfiguration of radial distribution systems

Authors
Yamamoto, RY; Pinto, T; Romero, R; Macedo, LH;

Publication
INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ELECTRICAL POWER & ENERGY SYSTEMS

Abstract
This work presents a specialized tabu search algorithm applied to the problem of electric power distribution systems primary feeders' reconfiguration. The specialization is related to two fundamental aspects of the tabu search algorithm. The first proposal eliminates the concept of a list of prohibited attributes and the aspiration criterion, but also avoids the possibility of revisiting a candidate solution so that cycling is avoided by maintaining a tabu list with all previously visited solutions. The second proposal is the possibility of restarting the search from the incumbent solution while avoiding paths that can be formed by revisiting candidate solutions. A new strategy based on Prim's algorithm generates a high-quality initial solution for the problem. Tests are conducted using the 33-, 84-, 118-, 136-, and 415-node test systems. The results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposal for solving the reconfiguration problem since the best-known solution for each system is achieved within highly efficient execution times.

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